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WQHS Interviews the Wild Beasts @ Johnny Brenda’s

Johnny Brenda’s, February 25th, 2010

Producing some of the most fascinating and unique pop music since…oh we don’t even know its so good…the Wild Beasts will romance you into a music coma. Their newest album, Two Dancers (2009), features intertwining falsetto and baritone vocals layered over playful rhythms and sweeping sexual bass lines that imbue their tracks with danceable pulse. Despite the intricate instrumentation their music is catchy, beautiful, sad, and sure does fill a venue to the brim.

In a cramped back room before their set at Johnny Brenda’s, WQHS sat down with the Wild Beasts to talk about, among other things, pink guitars, underwater tanks, falling off stages, and music. What follows is the record of our rather long conversation.

Needless to say their set left us speechless, battling the snowstorm all the way home still warm from the last chords of ‘Cheerio Chaps…’ and the numerous beers we threw back with the mates. We doubt Johnny Brenda’s will see the likes of such a grand performance anytime soon and we recommend you see the Wild Beasts in New York this summer, you won’t regret it.

Can you tell we’re fans? Now for the Interview you’ve all been waiting for… 

We’ve never been to Johnny Brenda’s before. Do you like this venue?

Tom: It’s awesome. It’s like a little theater in there with the balcony. It’s really intimate. I think people will be looking on top of our heads and be right in our faces. It’ll be really nice I think.

Yeah, I think it’s one of the smallest venues to have this kind of balcony, right?

Hayden: It’s a small stage and I think Tom makes a good spin doctor; it’s intimate.

[laughter]

Do you like smaller spaces as opposed to bigger spaces?

Chris: We need bigger spaces, really. We struggle with smaller spaces. But it harkens back to the old days before we bought a lot of our big gear.

Ben: We played Boston last night though and it was a small stage, at least it was a nice venue.

Were you scared you were going to fall off?

Ben: yeah…

Tom: It just happened. You know, it’s not out of the question. Falling over each other and that sort of thing…

I heard you guys sold out Bowery Ballroom. That’s amazing! I’m really happy for you, being from Brooklyn.

YEAH. Thank you. We’re playing Music Hall of Williamsburg as well.

Yeah, the second show! Might go to that one too.

So you might be coming to the NY show?

Hopefully, weather permitting with the snow and all. Do you get this much snow back in Kendal?

Tom: It was actually really cold and snowy when we left, but that was unusual.

Hayden: Yeah, a bit of a freak.

Tom: In the last couple of weeks it’s been really cold, but generally speaking it’s been just raining. Raining, raining so the weather doesn’t really change.

Do you guys still live in Kendal?

Tom: Uh, well, we’ve kind of been in between places. A couple of us have been in Kendal and a couple of us have been in Leeds. And now we are children of the road.

Those are the best kind of children. [laughter]

Tom: I hope so!

So did anything crazy ever happen on stage? Something memorable?

Chris: …Hayden fell over.

Tom: Yeah, he was playing bass and he couldn’t put his hands out and just kind of landed on the top of his head. He was fine!

Chris: He kept on playing bass.

Hayden: I actually lose my balance quite a lot on stage, but that one time it went and I was physically fine but I was so embarrassed I just wanted to die.

Ben: It was a bit of a stupid stage, sort of like a stand.

Tom: And there was no room so you had to put the monitors behind you and it was sort of like a trap.

Hayden: It was in Liverpool as well, and every Liverpudlian person who was there thought I was the world’s funniest comedian so…

I think I heard of a stage where everyone that gets on falls off… somewhere in Europe.

Hayden: Oh really? There’s always funny footage. It’s not on youtube yet so I got lucky.

I’ll be looking for that.

[laughter]

Tom: Generally speaking, we haven’t really got money to afford to buy stage-worthy equipment to play to all these people that want to see us. So like…it’s not really funny. It’s just disastrous.

Ben: Yeah. In Prague once, my guitar stopped working. So I was kind of like miming for three songs.

[laughter]

Tom: Thing is you didn’t try to change, you were just like, ‘I’m just going to mime’

Ben: [laughter] NO no, I was trying to work it out!

Hayden: It was being broadcasted on national Czech tv and we agreed that it would be the first three songs that we recorded there that you were miming to. [laughter]

It’s the look that matters, nothing else right? Not the music or anything… 

Tom: Worse thing was he had to use a guitar that wasn’t pink, which really won’t do.

[laughter]

Have you experienced a change in audience reactions now that you are onto your second full-length album?

Hayden: Yeah, I think it’s more rounded. And there is a nostalgic element to it. When we play the old stuff, which I think is always nice, you know?

Tom: You notice when there is a sense of people who are like, ‘yeah I knew this band before this album.’ You get that kind of feedback, which is great. Obviously it’s wonderful when people understand the new stuff and really take it on board, but there is this kind of guilty element on the job when people do scream out for the old stuff. It’s like a club. Though much smaller than this one so…

I’m sure they all sing along right?

Hayden: Yeah, I mean, I think American audiences in general are far more willing to participate, and sort of, um, be strung along, which is great for us because it makes it effortless. It makes the small things easy to shine because often you find yourself doing these spectacular stage moves just to try and translate and it’s nice just to be able to relax and let the energy come through. And we found that immediately, as soon as we arrived in L.A. where in the U.K. it sometimes can be far more of a battle, I suppose, not to put our home audience down.

For American bands sometimes it’s the opposite way. They go to England and they get a huge reaction there.

Hayden: Yeah, I think there is a mutual appreciation that people know you crossed the Atlantic to do this. And also, I think there is a slight romance there. In the U.K. a New York band has automatically twice the anticipation from a band from say, London. I think it’s sort of equivalent here.

Chris: Exotic in a way.

Tom: That’s the thing; I think we’re all kind of… I think there is this myth about us… well not a myth, it’s the truth; that we all come from a small town and the knowledge of coming back is always quite nice. I like to call it our Bon Iver myth, you know what I mean? It [his album] was made in cabin and it [this myth] helps [his career], you know? It’s strange to have that, because where we come from isn’t exotic at all.

It probably would be for us.

Tom: yeah I guess so, it’s quaint.

Hayden: The unknown is always exotic.

Tom: Also, for American bands. The traveling we’ve done on this tour…just the distances are incredible. We did like three days driving from Seattle to Minneapolis and it was like minus 25 centigrade and stuff and there was ice on the windows and it was terrifying. You suddenly remember you are in the middle of a huge continent in winter, miles from the shore, everything is flat and covered in snow. It’s quite, um…

Brutal?

Tom: Yeah! No, brutal is right.

So, feeding off of that live energy, are there certain songs that you prefer to play live? Your favorites?

Tom: For me personally, that changes nightly. It’s dependent on how I’m feeling, how we’re playing it…

Ben: When we put the new ones out. It’s good to test the new ones and see how they go down.

Are you going to be testing out new songs tonight?

Ben: Well, not new songs. Just the ones we haven’t played since we recorded the album.

But they’re on Two Dancers, right?

Tom: Yeah, yeah sorry.

[laughter]

Tom: But it’s only really Two Dancers II which came together completely in the studio and is made from a whole bunch of little fragments. And to try to piece together that song live is a lot of fun. You have your hands all over the place. It’s a different approach as well, a lot more space and quieter so it’s a different experience playing it.

Well, speaking of Two Dancers, this album sounds more cohesive than some of your previous work. It seems that you really thought about tying melodic themes throughout the album. Like, you hear at the end of Hooting and Howling the Two Dancers melody…

Tom: You just got in my good book for spotting that.

[laughter]

… how did you approach writing the album? Did you think about the tracks separately or did you always have a consistent theme in mind? 

Hayden: I think the initial plan was to have a completely seamless album with songs going into each other. That was the master plan. But time allowance and the immediacy of having to make the album, we just had to concentrate on things a bit more separately. I think things just seem to happen really organically and I think what we learned was that to have an element of control you have to actually just let go and sort of let chance make things happen. And that was really empowering to just let ourselves be free and not over think it I suppose. The first album took maybe about five years in total and I think by the end of it we over thought. And all of the little intricacies and details that we sort of took for granted actually became these complex tapestries that people had to work hard to unwind, whereas with the second album, consciously we wanted to be more user friendly.

Because it seems like puzzle pieces that come together. Not a lot of bands can do things like that and it works really well.

Tom: Yeah, I think that’s really nice. We took the right risks and we left a lot to chance on the record. We sorted out the right things and left the right things to chance and it might not work, but we sort of found a good way of working. The whole two dancers thing was all thematic it was all completely… well, it wasn’t all completely accidental, but it wasn’t planned from the start. It just sort of came out in what we were writing and what we were circling around. It is sort of that sense of throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks and realizing how small ideas are. You don’t need a lot of ideas. Ideas can do a lot of heavy lifting; it’s just about organization and decisions.

In terms of that, what’s the meaning of Two Dancers, the title track?

Tom: Part I, it’s kind of like: look what I’ve been through for you, I’ve done this for you, and now what am I left with you… know what I mean? But I’d do it all again. It’s deliberately off topic, deliberately a bit harsh, then it’s dragged out for a second part and it’s either real or imagined but not really decided. There’s an old English poem that goes, oh apart apart…endure, that kind of structure, just like a story told through just details, without any in between bits, which is kind of the point of the whole album. Just to tell our fucking story.

It’s a very powerful song, I can say that.

Tom: Thank you.

This question is a bit out of left field but of the four of you who can hold their breath the longest underwater?

Hayden: We actually had a competition a few weeks ago, I think I won it.

Is that why you were under water in the “We Still Got the Taste Dancing on Our Tongues” video?

Tom: I was no where near that, I’m a very weak swimmer as well. There’s a horrible experience with that video.

Hayden: It was like sharing bathwater with each of them, which is too much.

Also, it wasn’t in the ocean or anything right?

Hayden:  It was in a big tank. The heat of the water as well was the worst thing…

Tom: It was staggering hot, there was a lifeguard on hand.

Chris: It was like a bath.

Benny: It was a hot bath with hot lights.

Tom: And if you splash you’d shatter the lights and you’d be in broken glass, you had to keep very calm.

It seemed like a very difficult feat, moving around with instruments.

Tom: We won’t do it again.

Chris: There’s Waterproof speakers they’d plug in put them under the water,  you could actually hear the water. I don’t know how they work but they work so that’s how we mixed it.

I feel like those synchronized swimming competitions use those same speakers.

Tom: There’s a film director who used to do all these big set pieces, maybe like a hundred dancers, synchronized swimmers.

Like in the 50s with the flowered swim caps?

Tom: Yeah [laughter], I can’t remember the guys name, but I’m off on a tangent.

How much creative input do you have in your videos? Are they an extension of your songs? Do you put a lot of your thought into them?

Hayden: We tend to give people an open canvas and judge them on their ideas of us in that way. I think we sort of think video directors should be expert in what they do so much that we shouldn’t have to influence them so much.

Chris: We picked from numerous ideas that would get forwarded to us.

From fans who would send you ideas?

Tom: It would depend, the thing is of course we’re part of a huge machine now. I mean we have agents and managers and labels and press agents and that sort of thing so, I think in that kind of machine it gets a bit lost but its still possible to find people we know that can do the work for us. We meet people doing this as well you know, people who are good at what they do. We do send them briefs as well, with ideas saying this is what we meant by this….

In regards to going from the previous album to this album, there is a much more equal division in labor between your [Hayden, Tom] two voices and how they work together seamlessly. Was this a conscious thing, that now Tom has more parts, or like you said more of an organic process?

Hayden: It was definitely organic, we constantly have to develop and surprise ourselves, keep on our toes, you got to keep reinventing yourself in a way because that’s the way it stays interesting to us and if we stay interesting to us, then we’ll stay interesting to the people hopefully. I think there’s a bad sentiment at the moment where people have the safety to do what is expected of them, it’s a predictability there that has sort of become automatic which we can’t fall into because it would go against why we do it.

There’s a lot of layers in your music you guys should write a book of poems, a Wild Beasts poembook…

Tom: Lyrics reflect on what the music is, they can’t stand alone, but they’re there to do something in the song, and where you put them makes a big difference.

Where do you see yourself around the next 10 years, what would you really like to do when you wrap up touring besides sleep? [Laughter] Are there any people you want to work with?

Hayden: Ha! Sleep (laughs)

Tom: I want to make another album to start, ASAP.  We’re very busy. The upside and downside of success is a lot of people want to see you and you have to be in a lot of places, but you can’t be in rehearsal spaces.

Hayden: We had grand fans and the amazing thing about when we got into this industry was all the dreams and expectations we had were bit by bit deconstructed in front of us and you realize all the things you expected work in completely different ways. You plan work in a very different way after that. You still hold on as best you can to the ideals you had when you started, but it’s constantly morphing around you and your landscape changes all the time.

What dreams?

Hayden: Well this is our first tour in the states, and it’s taken us, first album came out in 2008 so, its taken us nearly two and a half years. You automatically think oh you get an album out, you come to the states, tour for 6 months and you become the kings of NY.

Tom: [laughter]…and you tour in comfort all your every need is catered to because you are now a signed band and you’re pros but it’s not like that at all. It’s very much day by day incremental improvements.

Hayden: It’s far more human than what it comes across as. It’s about relationships and people you meet and I think that’s the amazing thing. The whole industry is just run on interrelationships and people doing each other favors and giving each other the benefit of the doubt.

I promise if you ever want to come visit us at WQHS we will lavish you with gifts and attention.

[Laughter]

[WQHS gifts the Wild Beasts Black and White Cookies, an American staple from a Bakery in Brooklyn, coincidentally the next stop in their tour. The Wild Beasts are extremely pleased.]

….Benny: Wait what are we talking about. Oh shit cookies!….

It was wonderful meeting you guys. Hopefully we’ll meet again sometime in the future.

Tom: Thank you so much.